Windows 10 on phones: This is the one reason I’m so excited

Microsoft unveiled its first Windows 10 flagship phones during a press conference in New York City on Tuesday, including the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL, both pictured above. They seem to be pretty great phones, with Quad HD displays, high-end processors, plenty of RAM and storage, and the next-gen USB-C interface. But there’s one feature that really has me incredibly excited for these devices to launch, and it’s called Continuum.

We’ve already known a bit about Continuum, but Microsoft explained how it will really work on Tuesday. You basically just take your phone, plug it into the Microsoft Display Dock, and suddenly you have a full desktop, support for an external display, USB ports for a mouse and keyboard and more. If you rely on Office for work — Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint, maybe — then you can almost certainly get a bulk of your job done without even carrying your notebook around. Head to the office, plug into a Display Dock, fire off some work. Unplug your phone, slide it into your pocket, finish work at home.

If you listen to the TechnoBuffalo Show podcast, you know that I’ve been dying for this kind of gadget forever. Sure, I can hook a Surface up to another display, but that device is more bulky than what I really want. I want to literally do all of my work from a device I can slide into my pocket.

There are some roadblocks for me right now, but that may change in the future. I require Google Hangouts to do a lot of my work, and Google hasn’t offered up support for Windows phone in previous years. Rumor has it that might change, but it hasn’t yet. Also, I don’t really want to carry a keyboard and mouse with me everywhere I go, so I’ll need to make sure that there’s always a setup for me at the other destination — maybe the TechnoBuffalo office in Irvine, for example.

But still, this is so, so cool. I can’t wait for other app makers to build Continuum support into Windows 10 apps so that they can scale full screen when connected to another monitor. For once, my phone will actually feel like a full computer. Maybe there won’t exactly be lines for Microsoft’s Lumia 950 XL when it launches later this month, but I’m willing to order one as soon as I can.